In ultra-conservative Afghanistan, where if you are a woman, taking part in sports is generally frowned upon, a handful of pioneers are fighting to live their dream of swimming at the Olympics in Tokyo, Agence France Press reports.
Elena Saboori, a 25 year-old coach from Kabul who is heading the Women’s Swimming Committee first taught herself how to swim by watching tutorial videos on the Internet and practicing in a public pool in the Afghan capital.
Uninitiated, Saboori was afraid she would drown. She persisted nonetheless and was inspired to encourage other women through teaching, she told the AFP.
“That’s when I thought I’d become a coach, because girls do not know how to swim here,” the economics student said.
Saboori has since been appointed to the Women’s Swimming Committee —which is campaigning to create the first national women’s swimming team—and coaches women in the only pool, out of the 30 currently in existence in Afghanistan, where girls are allowed to swim.
Since the group’s beginnings, women swimmers have been discouraged from participating and there have been violent threats against the facility for allowing Saboori’s team train to there.
“We have several types of threats, but I feel that it [the security situation] is a bit better and I am not as afraid as before,” she tells AFP.
“But I know that I have broken a taboo. I took a big risk by launching this team.”
Afghanistan is still a country at war and faces a growing threat from ISIS as the terrorist group loses ground in Iraq. But the greatest scourge for these Olympic hopefuls might be Afghanistan’s enduring religious and cultural norms, which prevent women from baring flesh in public.
Saboori and her team members are prohibited from swimming with any part of their body exposed, according to AFP. For that reason, the women swim with a combination of tights, long-sleeved lycra tops and bonnets to make sure their arms, tights, back and hair are kept away from prying eyes.
Saboori says she is working with a company in Brazil to design the right swimwear for her team.
Shattering these norms and other modernization throughout Afghanistan is what motivated the president of the Afghanistan Swimming Federation, Sayed Ihsan Taheri, to launch an online fundraiser to support the first National Women’s Swimming Team.
“In Afghanistan, swimming is not standard as it is in the world” he told Open Water Swimming ” But it is an opportune moment in the country’s history to take the right stance on this and social issues.”
“Cultural barriers are shifting and melting day by day and people are starting to accept the modernizing trends that held back the country culturally in recent past” he added.
Even the most patriarchal Muslim countries where women are mostly confined to their homes, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have women’s swimming teams.
The goal of the Federation is empower the 20 or so young female swimmers as equal partners and build capacity to support other women who might be interested in taking on the sport in coming years.
Impressed by Saboori’s courage and leadership, Taheir appointed her head of the women’s committee earlier this year.
Their ambition? For the first time, to send 1 or 2 female swimmers to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games to represent Afghanistan alongside their male counterparts.
If the campaign succeeds, these women would be Afghanistan’s first ever females to compete in the Olympics.
